6 Ways to Track Sales from Your Community – Ep 21

In this episode, we share the tools and methods to measure how well your community is doing.

Episode Highlights: 6 Ways to Track Sales

1. Create an email list

Creating an email list helps you measure the movement of the needle. It helps you connect with your community better and grow relationships, but also helps you measure community analytics.

You can use your email list to measure analytics and experiment with what gets more clicks, different headline styles, images or no images, open rate and also track if your audience is responsive to your call to action.

Email is not dead and is a must for your marketing efforts.

2. Use UTM codes

See the link below to Google’s UTM Code builder by Google Analytics. Drop your website URL, a campaign source (your newsletter name) and campaign medium (set to email). You’ll want to include a note or slogan in your medium so you can associate and track where the traffic came from.

Another tool is PixelMe, a URL shortener you can use with retargeting campaigns on Facebook and Twitter, building a retargeting audience list in the background of people who have engaged or interacted with those accounts.

3. Set up a goal

Kami has created a tutorial video for setting up a funnel in Google Analytics. See below for a link to the video tutorial.

Set up a funnel, establish a goal and monitor outcomes and measure the results of your goals.

4. Create content for your Tribe

Create supplemental content and measure the success of your sales from that content.

People want to work with you and they want to know how they can work with you. Madalyn discusses how she uses freebies and giveaways through Thinkific.

Adapt this to what you do, whether your product is a service or something physical. Think about who you’re trying to reach and what you can offer them. It doesn’t have to be a sale, it can be a download, a sign-up, changing behaviors or any actionable that you’re asking your audience to do.

5. Ask and keep track of how people heard about you

This may sound old-fashioned, but it works. You can ask on a prospect call or include a question in a web or sign up form. Kami uses this method of information gathering on the Zoetica website contact form.

Madalyn discusses how she connected with Jay Busselle and how he found her through the speaker list for Social Media Marketing World, looking for Twitter experts. He followed the Twitter chat and was inspired to start his own chat, Promo Chat which has been successful for over a year.

5. Create coupon codes

Creating a special coupon code for your community and using different ones for each touchpoint, especially for events, allows you to track the audience as they relate to the code.

Codes can be used with Thinkific for courses, Eventbrite for events and most merchant providers work with codes for sales as well.